The wide aisles fit a crate-loader, and at least a quarter of the hull remained empty. A transiter like this would usually visit all the stations in a hub before heading to its final destination.
He only had to locate water, food, and light. For Mercury, of course. He could recycle whatever he needed internally.
But her problems were his problems now. At least, if he wanted another taste of her strangely addictive kiss.
While he examined the crates’ content listings, she jerked out of a standing doze, stumbled forward with her arms out, and smacked her shin into a crate. With a muffled cry, she dropped to the ground to rub her shin and hit her head on the same corner.
“Don’t—” he started to say.
She stepped backward, tripped, and landed on her butt.
“—move.” He knelt by her side. “Are you okay?”
She rubbed her forehead. Tears glistened in her eyes and her wince contained such pain he wanted to hug her to him, even though her voice was strong. “Fine.”
“Mercury.” Her grimace told him the truth and he cursed his unresponsive hands. “Please stay here.”
“Nothing’s bruised but my ego.”
“I’m going to push you the materials to construct a light.”
She still tried to rise. “I can handle this.”
“It will help me to move them to this location if I can use you as a beacon to guide me.”
Her movement checked. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. You draw my eye from every direction.”
Her cheeks flushed. She rubbed them. “If you say so.”
“Absolutely.”
A cracked solar heater, dumped into an ancient freezer that radiated light when exposed to warmth, converted the freezer’s meager candles into toasty warmth. The heater emitted a small, high-pitched whine, irritating enough to get it junked, but hadn’t affected its superior combustion.
“It’s still dark,” she said through a yawn.
“Keep watching,” he said.
In the growing heat, the freezer’s light jumped several full lumens. The solar heater converted the light to more heat. A nice glow illuminated their small corner of the vast cavern.
Mercury looked up at the limits of the darkness, yawned, and rubbed her elbows.
“Are you cold?”
She blinked. “Oh, not especially. I was just thinking—”
Her irises focused on his forehead. Her mouth dropped open. She pushed him into an old shuttle seat.
“This is more than a graze.” She touched the dead metal ridge of his melted cranium. “Doesn’t it hurt?”
“I shut off the pain receptors.”
A frown of confusion crossed her face. “Did you learn to in the military?”
“Military?” Ah, she thought he was a human stented with cybernetic implants. They rewired emotion and turned humans into veritable robots. “No.”
She tilted his chin with her cool fingers. Her soft breasts pressed against his forearm. “You should at least lie down.”
“Only if you lie with me.”
Her frown curved to a gentle smile.
He liked it.
And he liked that he had her full attention. His image alone filled her soft blue eyes. It awoke a new sensation deep in his chest. Something like…an ache.
But his sensors indicated no damage to his chest. How odd.
The freezer lumens increased.
Her eyes flew wide in horror. “The hole goes through.”
“A flaw of my design.”
“Design?”
“My body isn’t as reinforced as a combat droid.”
Awareness slowly overtook her. “You’re a robot.”
He calculated the best response. She feared the Robotics Faction and might run, hurt herself, or try to hurt him. Thanks to her uncle, she trusted the military, and he’d make an easier life convincing her to trust him.
But he didn’t.
Despite all risks, he needed her to know the truth. “Yes.”
“Then…” She bit her lip. “You’re not going to die from this injury.”
Was that her concern? “No.”
She threw her arms around him and buried her face in his neck.
Her shoulders shook. She was crying again. Over him.
The aching sensation returned.
“Mercury,” he said softly. “Save your moisture. We haven’t produced water.”
“I know.” Her frame shuddered. “I never do what I’m supposed to.”
He used his elbows to lever her into his lap. Stretched out against him, her soft waist pressed into his and their legs entwined. Her trusting forehead rested against his chin, and the damp scent of her tears soaked into his flight suit.
Heat kindled between them. A strange heat. One he didn’t understand.
Oh, her heartbeat flexed blood through sixty thousand miles of blood vessels, warming the skin now pressed against his. That, he understood.
What he didn’t understand was the burning sensation where their bodies touched. Like the ache in his chest, or the constant impulse to nibble at her kissable lips, or the strange hardening of his cock, it made no sense.
And yet, still he sensed it.
Mercury’s shudders turned into long sighs of sleep. She dropped off with her forehead tucked under his chin.
These rampant impulses could not be allowed to continue.
He had a rogue agent to capture and Mercury’s life to save.
Yves turned his analysis inward, cupping her lush beauty against him while he determined the best method to kill the uncontrollable desires slowly overtaking his heavily damaged brain.
~*~*~*~
For the first time since the arrest notice, Mercury really slept.
She woke with a gummy throat, a mild headache, and a body heavy with bruises. But her thoughts ran clear.
Yesterday, she had survived an attack by the Robotics Faction—with the help of one of their members. A man—no, an android—who covered her with smoldering kisses, filled her with aching desires, and held her safe as a child. An android who observed her more deeply than she observed herself. Yet she knew nothing about him.
Even now, his brilliant blue-gold eyes studied her. “Feel better?”
“Much.” She stroked the lean muscled arms. “How about you? How do you…feel?”
“I feel fine.”
“Really?” She swore the hot imprint of his lips lingered on hers. “This is a weird question, but, do you actually feel anything?”
“I experience sensations.”
“You know that’s not what I’m asking.”
“Robots don’t feel.” Logic swept his expression clear. “I don’t suffer emotions.”
That was what she had understood in school. Like her alarm pet, which had a simple processor, didn’t feel pain when she shut it off or loneliness when she left it alone all day. Robots like the enforcer on Mares Mercury were just alarm pets with extra programs. She had never met one as advanced as Yves. So why did he ask for kisses or hold her with such tenderness?
“Not everyone experiences physical contact as an emotional event,” he said softly, reading her mind. “A kiss can be only physical. Even among humans, this is true.”
It was a one-time thing. I was just curious. It didn’t mean anything.
Hadn’t she left her undesirable self behind on Mares Mercury? Wasn’t she out in the big universe now? Out of billions of men, she ought to run into a few who found themselves uncontrollably attracted and fell deep into love.
But not today, apparently.
She shifted. “Let me up.”
Yves lifted his arms and unhooked the leg he had curled possessively around her knees. She slid off and thumped the floor. Pain radiated up her tailbone, and understanding radiated the other direction.
The robot hadn’t been hugging her possessively. He’d held her up to stop her from hurting herself.
Since his hands remained paralyzed below the wrist, keeping he
r set of hands functional made perfect sense.
In the industrial glow of the open freezer, she rose and stretched. Her bruised body squeaked. “How fine is ‘fine’?”
“I’m operating at 70 percent capacity.” The bullet hole resembled a facial tattoo, but at the wrong angle, the freezer light glowed through. “Given time, I will route around the problem. It will then become cosmetic.”
Black scarred his left elbow. “Is this also cosmetic?”
“Unfortunately no.” He lifted the arm; below the wrist hung useless. “My limbs don’t have the same rerouting capability. We’ll attempt a repair.”
She hugged him. He had survived. The fleetest memory of him dead in the darkness of the crate welled tears behind her eyes. For this exact instant, she loved him completely, even if he was an unfeeling robot. “I’ll do anything.”
“Mercury.” His voice softened. “This is not your fault.”
“Of course it is.” She sniffed and straightened. Cressida wouldn’t spend every waking moment sopping wet, and neither did she. “What can I do?”
“You can kiss me.”
Desire curled in her belly.
She crushed it. Robots reacted to programs, not mutual attraction. “Is this a trick?”
“No.” He licked his hard, masculine lips. “I would find it very helpful.”
“Helpful how?”
He studied her behind his impersonal green oculars. “You said you would do anything.”
“I meant to repair your hand.”
“How do you know your kiss won’t?”
She raised her brows. “Exactly how gullible do you think I am?”
His careful blank expression said she didn’t want him to answer that.
She put her hands on her hips. “Is that supposed to motivate me to do what you want?”
He smiled. “I like you.”
Was he teasing her?
“I’m not teasing,” he said.
“I’m pretty sure ‘like’ is an emotion.” She turned to the junk. “Are you hungry? I could eat a raw protein cake right now.”
“Your stomach would prefer it be reprocessed first.” He pointed with his foot. “An electro-welder can repair my elbow. First, assemble these reprocessor parts.”
“I was only joking about being hungry.”
“I don’t want you fainting halfway through.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“No, I suppose you would force yourself to persevere to the end and faint immediately afterwards, which is also unacceptable.”
She followed his directions to break it down. “I’m not in any danger of starving, as you can see.”
His silence caused her to look up.
And his gaze, intense and brilliant, filled her with slow burning heat. “What I see is a beautiful, capable woman, who is as handy with a wrench as she is with making herself sexy. The last thing I want is her starving on my watch.”
Her heart squeezed.
“You should get those oculars checked,” she muttered, before her heart burst right out of her chest and hugged him.
While the raw protein solids disassembled in the reprocessor, sorting themselves into molecules that she could program into other, more edible foods, she coaxed the weak machine to produce a cup of water that smelled like bitter cheese.
She gagged it down and coughed. “Ugh. That tasted worse than my first attempt at chicken soup. It’s harder than you think. Everything was all cold and sour and crunchy.”
“Ah, yes. You’re a chef.”
Ah, yes. He was a member of the Faction trying to kill her. And she needed to remember that the next time her heart started dancing in her chest.
She snapped a power control into the electro-welder. “Did you read about me in a file?”
He dropped silent.
Bullseye.
“You must know a lot about me.” She connected wires. “I don’t know anything about you.”
“You know about me, Mercury.”
She loved the way he said her name, so low and seductive and everything she had ever fantasized about.
No. It wasn’t fair. The words ought to gag him like the water.
“That should have been my first clue. You knew my name.”
His jaw shifted.
“What else is in my file?” She popped open the panel harder than necessary. “How I failed my first doctoral interview? How I never spent more than one night with a boy? How I chose Mares Mercury as my hideout for the ridiculous reason that it shares my name?”
“No.”
She rubbed her forehead. Although no one would call her Cro-Magnus now, the dull thud felt too familiar. “Were you sent to kill me?”
“Also no.”
Seriously? She nailed his expressionless face. “You, a super-advanced robot, happened to be sitting across from me for all those days, and it had nothing to do with the Kill List?”
He sat perfectly still. A statue. A robot.
Oh.
She rubbed her forehead. “You lie. You were sent to kill me.”
“I was sent,” he said, “to capture the rogue. You were bait.”
Her heart bounced off the floor and landed hard in her chest. “Why are you trying to kill us?”
“I am not trying—”
“Your Faction. What did we do?”
“I did not receive that data.”
“What did my sister do?”
“I need more data to answer that question.”
“You said that you knew why we were on the Kill List.” Bitterness for the years she had lost, that her whole family had lost, poisoned her tongue. “You wreck lives and you don’t even know why.”
“That is what I do know,” he said. “For ending up on the Kill List, blame the rogue. She stole your restore points.”
“But your Faction came after both of us. Someone like her warned us about the danger. Otherwise, Cressida never would have escaped.”
“If not for her betrayal, you never would have had to escape.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The rogue is the one who betrayed both of you to us.”
No. How could that be true? Mercury shook her head. “What?”
“When she steals your data, she leaves a calling card. That is the only way we are able to track her. She moves through our networks like a ghost. There are as many restore points in the universe as there are light particles in this frigate, and we would never know if one disappeared unless she announced it.”
“But she helped us.” Mercury gripped onto the one memory of her truth. The late night meeting, her parents emerging sad and worried, their hushed and furtive escape. “Robots did come to Cressida’s school. She had to be smuggled out to save her life from you. I mean, your Faction.”
“She touches your restore point because there is something particular about you. Something of interest to both her and the Faction. Perhaps for the Faction, it is only that she has touched it; perhaps her touch corrupts humans the same way that it corrupts robots.”
“But she keeps getting away.”
“Another reason there is more than dispassionate interest in stopping her. Previously, the rogue systematically destroyed our nearby agents. Now, instead of killing, she turns us insane.”
“Insane how?”
“You were supposed to die in that departure lounge.”
But instead, he had saved her. “That was insane?”
It was against the assignment. “Essentially, yes.”
“We’re back to the killing.” She thumped her palm lightly on her bruised knee. “Why kill the bait? We’re not any danger to you.”
“Are you sure?” A strange fire lit his eyes. “I find myself distracted by your presence. Something about you is different from all other humans. Something mesmerizing.”
Her heart squeezed.
No, bad heart. And bad electricity racing along her skin, sizzling into her center, making a hundred promises of the ways she could become dangerous t
o the logical robot. Ways involving sweet kisses and molten caresses and aching passion.
Mercury picked up the electro-welder. “You always have to do the assignment?”
He shifted to make room for her to position it. “It’s always most logical to do so.”
“And you always do what’s most logical?”
“Always.” He looked like he was about to say more but closed his mouth.
So back to her original question. Why kiss her?
“I’d help you even if you didn’t come on to me,” she tried.
“That’s not why,” he said.
“No?”
“And I did not come on to you.” He looked away. “I tested a hypothesis.”
“My mistake.” Even muddled in a garbage frigate with a disconnected, shot-up robot who had originally been assigned to watch her die, she still wanted to press herself against him and lose herself in his arms.
The high-pitched whine of the heater grated.
She sighed. “Let’s fix your hands.”
“I’m not going to kill you.”
“You could have watched me die any time, from the transit lounge to the crate.”
“But I couldn’t.” He fixed her with his impenetrable gaze. “I couldn’t let you die, because I need you.”
Mercury refused the rising hope his words woke in her. She clamped the electro-welder to his forearm. “I can’t imagine why.”
“Mercury—”
“Are we going to do this?” she snapped. “Tell me what to do.”
According to his instructions, she peeled back his skin to the metal bone. Magnetese, an astronomically expensive metal, stuck his blood together so it circulated around the wound and didn’t gush out.
With a microscope and his careful analysis, she affixed clampers, micro-irons, and solder to his forearm and powered up the controls. Last, she only had to type in his welding coordinates.
But this was her they were talking about….
The second time she entered “86” instead of “68,” clamping a nerve to the bone and making his fingers spasm, she had to let go of the tool.
She rubbed her damp forehead. “I am trying to help you.”
“You can do this.”
“No, I mean—” The delicate operation felt like the night before her dissertation, when every jewelry box truffle fell in, burned, or melted, and all she could see hour after hour, redo after redo, was the people who had believed in her looking disappointed. “I am trying. I promise.”
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